A Tribute to Barry Goldwater

The following was delivered byDouglas Stivison at
the VWOA Annual Awards Banquet, June 5, 1998

Barry Goldwater passed away last week, and people of all political persuasions are
mourning the passing of a man known for straight talking throughout his life.

And we of the VWOA lose our Honorary President. In fact, we lose the man who held
the office longer than any of his distinguished peers including Guglielmo Marconi, Lee
DeForest, David Sarnoff, and Herbert Hoover. We will miss him.

Barrys fascination with radio was lifelong, and like so many of us, it
started with a crystal set which he constructed as a boy. He maintained a showcase amateur
station that was also, by far, the best-known Military Affiliated Radio System (MARS)
station not actually located on a military base. Barrys legendary generosity
extended to letting many others, particularly young people, use his fine equipment, big
antenna, and excellent location.

As an influential lawmaker he was a strong advocate for amateur radio, was a
strong supporter of the 1964 amateur radio postage stamp, worked behind the scenes to
assure amateur representation on international regulatory teams, and he was a force behind
loosening the amateur regulations to include reciprocal licensing with many nations.

Barry was a strong advocate on liberalizing (truly a strange term to ever include
in the same sentence with his name) the amateur rules, especially those to do with
reciprocal licensing and third party traffic handling. In fact, it was in large part due
to his pioneering views that the total rewriting of part 97 of the FCC regulations
occurred under President Ronald Reagan.

Beside the amateur-radio-specific issues just mentioned, Barry was a strong voice
in the Senate in support of a broad range of technology issues, both military and
civilian. He expressed many times his belief that technology leadership, technology
education, and technology investment were fundamental both to our nations economy as
well as its defense,

The connection between Barry Goldwater and the VWOA spans more than three decades,
not quite half the history of our organization. He joined the VWOA in 1966, fully
qualifying as a veteran member for his military service as both pilot and radio operator
in the Air Service, later the Air Force. In 1968 he accepted our highest award, the
Marconi Gold Medal. Four years later, in 1972, he accepted the office of Honorary
President. He held the office for 27 years.

Barry will certainly be remembered for his political views, but I am certain that
he will be remembered even longer for his character.

His politics are well known. He lost the 1964 national presidential election, a
loss universally attributed to his outspoken conservatism. He was lambasted at the time as
too extreme only to find that his problem was not the extremity of his views so
much as timing. President Reagan, one of the most popular presidents in history, ultimately
ran and served on a platform of smaller government and greater personal responsibility
which was modeled on Barry Goldwaters platform.

Barry was, in many ways, simply ahead of his time. Though a losing presidential
candidate, he was also virtually single-handedly responsible for the redefinition of the
power base of his own party, shifting it squarely away from the Northeast into the South
and West. This power shift was in many ways directly responsible for the growing strength
of his party in later years.

Although routed in the 1964 general election, Barry Goldwater will be remembered
for a legacy of political achievement that escaped the man who defeated him for the White
House. Both Colin Powell and General Norman Schwartzkopf have repeatedly credited much of
the victory in Operation Desert Storm directly to the reorganization of the
American military after Viet Nam.

Barry Goldwater and Sam Nunn of Georgia, together studied the operational problems
with military command that plagued our forces in Viet Nam, and they worked tirelessly to
change them in order to allow for much faster, must more flexible, and much more effective
strategic and tactical decision making.

It may be one of the great ironies of American history that possibly Barry
Goldwaters greatest single contribution to our nation may well be the
revitalization of the military after the Viet Nam defeat. And Barry achieved this by
studying the mistakes made in Viet Nam by the man who defeated him in the race for the
White House  Lyndon Johnson.

Goldwater received a tremendous amount of criticism for his Senatorial votes
against the landmark Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s. The interesting thing is
that he was anything but a bigot, anything but a racist. His opposition to the legislation
stemmed from his fundamental belief in restricting the size, scope, and reach of federal
power. He felt deeply that Washington should not legislate morality, should not control
every lunch counter, bus, and classroom in the nation . . . even if the goal of the
legislation, itself, was undeniably good and noble.

And Barry never missed an opportunity to say that he felt the goal of the Civil
Rights legislation was beyond reproach. In his own life, he organized the Arizona Air
National Guard which from day one was the first fully racially integrated National Guard
unit in the country. He was also no stranger to anti-Semitic prejudice against himself, as
the son of a Jewish businessman and a Christian mother. His favorite joke was the
apocryphal story of Phoenixs most restricted country club. Barry claimed that he
applied for membership when he was a young, successful businessman, but was refused
because he was half Jewish.He applied again when he entered local politics and was turned down again. When he
was elected to the Senate, he was turned down again. But in 1964, when it looked like
there was a chance that he might become President of the United States, the club
reconsidered how bad it would look to be the club that blackballed the President. So,
Barry claims the club membership committee finally offered him membership . . . but only
on the condition that he agreed to only play nine holes. Potential President or not, he
was still half Jewish.

But Barry is best known for his character.Despite his
often unpopular positions on issues, he was voted by his peers in the Senate, as "the
most congenial man in the Senate." Upon his retirement, his colleagues on both sides
of the aisle started the Goldwater Scholarship fund. He counted among his closest friends
Hubert Humphrey  as close to his political, philosophical opposite as one could
find.

The New York Times of May 30, 1998 contained an eloquent editorial about Barry
entitled "The Honorable Senator From Arizona."
It said, "Part of the reason
for such fraternal good will was that Mr. Goldwater saw politics as a debate over ideas,
not a blood sport for power. The other reason was that all sides knew he was one of those
rare creatures on Capitol Hill who talked straight."

Barry was one of a kind  outspoken political thinker, patriot, businessman,
Air Force General, United States Senator, father, husband, grandfather, radio amateur,
photographer, pilot, and like Marconi, DeForest, Hoover, and Sarnoff a great friend to the
VWOA.